[Home](https://stoneforgegroup.com/) · [Research](https://stoneforgegroup.com/research/) · What the Local Market Pays 04 – Research # what the local market pays In Sarasota, Manatee and Charlotte counties, professional-services pay per employee sits below the Florida and national figures – checked separately in each county, never as one combined figure, and confirmed by two federal data series built from different sources and different methods. ## Executive summary This study measures what professional-services establishments pay their employees in Sarasota, Manatee and Charlotte counties, against Florida and the United States, using two independent federal series: the Census Bureau's County Business Patterns (2022) and the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW, first quarter 2023, annualized). The three counties are three distinct county economies, not one measurable market, and this study never sums them into a combined figure or a combined table row – each is reported and compared on its own. By County Business Patterns, professional-services establishments in Sarasota County paid $71,742 per employee in 2022 – about 19% below Florida's $88,164 and about 32% below the national $105,185. Manatee County paid $64,670 – about 27% below the state figure and about 39% below the national one. Charlotte County paid $62,132 – about 30% below the state figure and about 41% below the national one. By QCEW's first-quarter 2023 average weekly wage, annualized, the same pattern appears in a second, independently built federal series. Sarasota's $87,048 sits about 14% below Florida's $101,244 and about 30% below the national $124,072. Manatee and Charlotte both land at exactly $92,300 – a genuine coincidence between two counties of very different size, not a pull error (see Methodology and sources, below) – about 9% below the state figure and about 26% below the national one. Every county, on both measures, pays less than the state figure and less than the national figure. That holds three times over, once per county, not once on an average across them. The two series do not measure identical things – County Business Patterns counts establishments and employer-reported annual payroll; QCEW counts a single quarter of unemployment-insurance wage records, annualized – so they corroborate each other rather than confirm the identical fact twice, and the reasons a market pays less are not settled by either series alone. See What this does not show, below. - Payroll per employee, County Business Patterns, 2022 - Average weekly wage annualized, QCEW, Q1 2023 Professional-services (NAICS 54/541) pay per employee by geography. Sarasota, Manatee and Charlotte counties are shown as three separate bars each, never combined. US Census Bureau, County Business Patterns, 2022; US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, first quarter 2023. ## Professional-services pay per employee is lower than the Florida and United States figures in Sarasota, Manatee and Charlotte counties alike, checked separately in each county and confirmed by two federal data series. County Business Patterns reports establishments, employment and annual payroll for professional, scientific and technical services (NAICS 54) at the county level. Dividing payroll by employment gives payroll per employee – not a wage rate, and not comparable to an individual's salary, but a measure of what establishments in a county pay out in total against how many people they employ. Florida's figure is $88,164; the national figure is $105,185. Every one of the three counties this firm serves sits below both. Professional-services establishments, employment and payroll, County Business Patterns, 2022 Geography Establishments Employees Annual payroll ($1,000s) Payroll per employee Sarasota County 2,168 10,939 784,784 $71,742 Manatee County 1,340 5,892 381,038 $64,670 Charlotte County 447 1,688 104,879 $62,132 Florida 92,313 602,566 53,124,544 $88,164 United States 974,303 10,152,104 1,067,844,288 $105,185 Sarasota's $71,742 is about 19% below Florida's $88,164 and about 32% below the national $105,185. Manatee's $64,670 is about 27% below Florida and about 39% below the nation. Charlotte's $62,132 is about 30% below Florida and about 41% below the nation. The three counties are not identical to each other – Sarasota pays the most of the three, Charlotte the least – but the direction is the same in every one: below the state, and further below the nation. A second, independently built federal series checks the same question a different way. QCEW reports a quarterly average weekly wage from unemployment-insurance wage records, for NAICS 541 (the QCEW industry code covering the same professional, scientific and technical services sector CBP calls NAICS 54). This study annualizes the first-quarter 2023 average weekly wage by multiplying by 52 – the standard shorthand BLS's own county wage releases use for a current read on pay, and the specific query documented in Methodology and sources, below. Average weekly wage, annualized (×52), professional and technical services, QCEW, first quarter 2023 Geography Average weekly wage Annualized Sarasota County $1,674 $87,048 Manatee County $1,775 $92,300 Charlotte County $1,775 $92,300 Florida $1,947 $101,244 United States $2,386 $124,072 Manatee and Charlotte reporting the identical $92,300 is a genuine coincidence, not a copy-paste or a pull error. The two counties have very different employment bases behind that figure – Manatee's professional-services workforce runs several times the size of Charlotte's in this dataset, and their total quarterly wage bills are nowhere near each other – so an identical weekly wage, to the dollar, is two different divisions landing on the same rounded result rather than one number reused. Confirmed live against the BLS API on 7 August 2026: Manatee's first-quarter 2023 average weekly wage is 1,775 from 146,602,060 dollars of quarterly wages across roughly 6,300 employees; Charlotte's is 1,775 from 58,670,620 dollars across roughly 2,540 employees – about a fifth of Manatee's payroll, over about a third of the employment, converging on the same weekly figure. See Methodology and sources, below, for the full query. ## The geography, stated plainly Sarasota and Manatee counties together form the North Port-Bradenton-Sarasota, FL Metro Area, CBSA 35840 – confirmed live against the Census API on 7 August 2026: the metro area's 26,583 establishments (all industries) equal Sarasota County's 15,693 plus Manatee County's 10,890, exactly. Charlotte County is not part of that metro area. It forms its own separate federally recognized area, the Punta Gorda, FL Metro Area, CBSA 39460, with 4,537 establishments – confirmed live against the same API on the same date. Charlotte is commonly described elsewhere as a micropolitan area; Census's own 2022 County Business Patterns data labels CBSA 39460 a Metro Area, not a Micro Area (the same field correctly returns "Micro Area" for other small Florida CBSAs queried alongside it, so this is not a generic label – see Methodology and sources, below). This study reports Census's own current classification rather than the older, more commonly repeated one. Sarasota, Manatee and Charlotte counties are grouped in this study because they are the market this firm serves, not because Census treats them as one statistical area – it does not, and this study never presents a total or an average across the three. Each county is its own row in every table on this page. ## Establishment size, by county A market's typical establishment size is a secondary exhibit here, not the finding – it supports the pay comparison above without leading it, and it does not move in one clean direction. Against the United States, all three counties skew toward smaller establishments: a higher share under five employees, a lower share in every larger band shown. Against Florida, the pattern is not uniform. Sarasota's share under five employees, 78.6%, sits almost exactly at Florida's own 78.7%. Manatee, at 82.8%, and Charlotte, at 81.0%, both run further toward small establishments than the state does. Share of professional-services establishments by employee-count band, County Business Patterns, 2022 Geography Under 5 5 to 9 10 to 19 20 to 49 Sarasota County 78.6% 10.9% 6.7% 2.4% Manatee County 82.8% 8.3% 4.9% 3.0% Charlotte County 81.0% 9.2% 6.3% 3.1% Florida 78.7% 10.3% 5.7% 3.5% United States 71.2% 12.7% 7.8% 5.1% Every county's 20-to-49-employee share sits below Florida's 3.5% and further below the nation's 5.1% – the one band where all three counties agree with each other and with the direction of the pay finding above. Read across the whole table, the honest description is that all three counties skew smaller than the nation, and two of the three – Manatee and Charlotte – skew smaller than Florida too, while Sarasota's smallest-establishment share tracks the state almost exactly. This exhibit is consistent with, and does not contradict, the pay finding; it is not offered as its explanation. ## What this does not show **Lower pay is consistent with several different explanations, and neither dataset can choose between them.** A lower cost of living, a different mix of services within professional, scientific and technical services, a less senior average staff mix, or a local labor market with a different supply of professional-services workers could each produce the same result on its own. This study measures the level of pay; it does not measure why that level sits where it does. **No revenue figure exists for these counties in this dataset.** County Business Patterns publishes establishments, employment and payroll at the county level, but no receipts or revenue variable at any geography below the state – confirmed against the CBP variable list (see Methodology and sources, below). Nothing in this study can be said about local margins, local productivity, or how much revenue a local establishment generates per dollar of payroll; that comparison is made in the companion [Leverage Gap](https://stoneforgegroup.com/research/the-leverage-gap/) study nationally and in [Florida Owner-Led Firms](https://stoneforgegroup.com/research/florida-owner-led-firms/) at state level, both from the Annual Business Survey. That survey does publish a county row for Sarasota, but at a relative standard error of 18.0%, with Manatee suppressed to zero and the metro area at 30.9% – published, and too unreliable to compare against anything. **County Business Patterns counts establishments, not firms.** A professional-services practice with two offices in Sarasota County is counted twice in every CBP figure on this page – once per establishment, not once per firm. A multi-location practice inflates the establishment count and, because payroll and employment are also reported per establishment location rather than consolidated by firm, does not by itself distort payroll per employee, but it does mean the establishment counts and the establishment-size table above describe locations, not businesses. See Establishments, not firms, in Methodology and sources, below. **The two federal series describe different windows in time.** County Business Patterns reports 2022 as a full year. QCEW, as used here, reports the first quarter of 2023, annualized. They are close but not identical periods, and the full 2022 annual QCEW average pay, where checked, differs from the first-quarter-2023-annualized figure this study reports – by a few percent in most counties and more in Charlotte's case. See Robustness against the full year, in Methodology and sources, below, for the comparison. ## Methodology and sources This study is meant to survive an adversarial read. Every figure below is reproducible from the steps stated here, and every judgement call is disclosed rather than left for a reviewer to guess at. ### Data sources Two federal series, from two different agencies, built from two different kinds of underlying record: - **US Census Bureau, County Business Patterns (CBP), 2022 data year.** Table cbp, at https://api.census.gov/data/2022/cbp. CBP counts employer establishments and reports employer-reported annual payroll, drawn from Census's Business Register – administrative and survey data Census itself compiles and edits. - **US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW).** Open Data API, at https://data.bls.gov/cew/data/api/. QCEW is not a Census product – it is built from unemployment-insurance wage records that employers file quarterly with state workforce agencies, then aggregated by BLS. These two series measure related but not identical things. CBP's payroll figure is what an employer reports to Census as its own annual payroll. QCEW's wage figure is built from the wage records employers file for unemployment-insurance purposes, a different reporting channel entirely, covering a single calendar quarter rather than a full year. The two series agreeing – both showing every county below the state and national figures – corroborates the finding; it does not confirm the identical fact twice, because the two numbers are not measuring the same thing in the same way. ### The exact CBP query The literal call, with the key redacted, for Sarasota County: https://api.census.gov/data/2022/cbp?get=ESTAB,EMP,PAYANN,EMPSZES&for=county:115&in=state:12&NAICS2017=54&key=REDACTED Run once per geography, changing the for clause: county:115&in=state:12 (Sarasota), county:081&in=state:12 (Manatee), county:015&in=state:12 (Charlotte), state:12 (Florida), us:* (United States). CBP's 2022 vintage keys its industry variable NAICS2017, not NAICS2022 – confirmed live; a different code-year name from the companion Leverage Gap study's abscs pull, despite both being 2022 data. EMPSZES selects which employment-size band a row describes; each call returns several rows, one per band, not just the one this study starts from. The script issuing these calls is scripts/research_pull.py, function cbp_rows(). ### Variable definitions - **ESTAB** – Census name "Number of establishments." A single physical business location with paid employees. Units: count of establishments, not firms – see Establishments, not firms, below. - **EMP** – Census name "Number of employees." Paid employees at establishments in the cell. - **PAYANN** – Census name "Annual payroll ($1,000)." Total annual payroll reported by establishments in the cell. Units: thousands of dollars – a row reporting 784,784 is reporting $784,784,000, not $784,784. - **EMPSZES** – Census name "Employment size of establishments code." Which employment-size band a row describes. Payroll per employee = PAYANN × 1,000 ÷ EMP, computed from the EMPSZES=001 ("All establishments") row only – the single unbanded total for the geography, not a sum across bands. Rounded to the nearest dollar for display. ### Establishments, not firms County Business Patterns counts establishments – individual business locations – not firms. A professional-services practice that operates a second office in the same county is counted as two establishments, with its employment and payroll split (or, depending on how the firm itself reports it, potentially duplicated) across both. Every establishment count, every establishment-size share and the headline payroll-per-employee figures on this page describe establishments, never firms or businesses – this page uses "establishment" throughout for exactly this reason. CBP publishes no firm-level count at all; a firm-level count exists in the Annual Business Survey, the source behind the companion [Leverage Gap](https://stoneforgegroup.com/research/the-leverage-gap/) and [Firm Size and Firm Age](https://stoneforgegroup.com/research/firm-size-and-age/) studies, but that survey’s county-level and metro-level estimates for this figure are not usable – confirmed live, see No revenue variable at this geography, below – which is why this study – the one built to answer a county-level question – uses CBP and inherits its establishment-based unit instead. ### Band suppression below the state level County Business Patterns suppresses EMP and PAYANN – but not ESTAB – on every employment-size band below the state level. Confirmed live against the API on 7 August 2026, Charlotte County's 5-to-9-employee band: https://api.census.gov/data/2022/cbp?get=NAME,ESTAB,EMP,PAYANN,EMPSZES&for=county:015&in=state:12&NAICS2017=54&key=REDACTED → ["Charlotte County, Florida","41","0","0","220"] (EMPSZES 220 = 5 to 9 employees) 41 establishments are reported in that band; EMP and PAYANN both come back zero, not a real count, on that same row. The identical query against the state (for=state:12) or the nation (for=us:*) returns real, non-zero EMP and PAYANN on every band. This is exactly why this study computes payroll per employee from the unbanded EMPSZES=001 row only, at every geography – the banded rows below the state level cannot support that computation at all, and the establishment-size table above reports establishment counts only, never a banded payroll or employment figure at the county level. ### Geography composition, confirmed Confirmed live against the Census API on 7 August 2026, all industries (NAICS2017=00): https://api.census.gov/data/2022/cbp?get=NAME,ESTAB&for=metropolitan+statistical+area/micropolitan+statistical+area:35840&NAICS2017=00&key=REDACTED → ["North Port-Bradenton-Sarasota, FL Metro Area","26583","35840"] https://api.census.gov/data/2022/cbp?get=NAME,ESTAB&for=county:115&in=state:12&NAICS2017=00&key=REDACTED (repeat for county:081, county:015) → Sarasota 15,693 · Manatee 10,890 · Charlotte 4,537 15,693 + 10,890 = 26,583, exactly matching CBSA 35840's own published total – Sarasota and Manatee are the whole of that metro area, and nothing else is in it. Charlotte's 4,537 establishments belong to a separate CBSA, 39460, which the same API labels "Punta Gorda, FL Metro Area." Queried the same way, two other small Florida CBSAs return "Arcadia, FL Micro Area" and "Okeechobee, FL Micro Area" – confirming the field genuinely distinguishes metropolitan from micropolitan rather than defaulting to one label. Charlotte County / Punta Gorda is accordingly reported here as its own metropolitan statistical area, not a micropolitan one, which corrects a characterization commonly repeated elsewhere (including in this study's own working brief, caught during this verification pass). ### The exact QCEW query The literal call, first quarter 2023, Sarasota County (area code is the county's five-digit FIPS code): https://data.bls.gov/cew/data/api/2023/1/area/12115.csv → row: own_code 5 (Private), industry_code 541, agglvl_code 75 (county, private, 3-digit NAICS), avg_wkly_wage 1674 Run once per geography, changing the area code: 12115 (Sarasota), 12081 (Manatee), 12015 (Charlotte), 12000 (Florida), US000 (United States). Each response is a full CSV of every industry and ownership sector for that area and quarter; the row this study reads has own_code "5" (private ownership – the only ownership sector reported for NAICS 541 at the county level; the small local-government component is suppressed for disclosure), industry_code "541", and agglvl_code "75" at the county level (state and national geographies carry different aggregation-level codes for the equivalent row). avg_wkly_wage is annualized by multiplying by 52. This is not a Census source, so research-provenance.py --refresh cannot check these figures the way it checks the CBP ones – they are declared in that script's MANIFEST as prose, with this exact query as their source note, for a human to re-run. QCEW is published on a lag, and the department's file layout differs between the annual endpoint (/api/YEAR/a/area/) and the quarterly endpoint (/api/YEAR/QTR/area/) used here – the column order and field names are not the same between the two, confirmed by inspecting both headers directly. ### Robustness against the full year A single quarter's average weekly wage, annualized, is a snapshot, not a full-year average, and it can diverge from one. Confirmed live against the BLS API on 7 August 2026, the full 2022 annual average pay for the same five geographies, from the annual endpoint's own published avg_annual_pay field (which BLS computes directly, not this study's own ×52 arithmetic): QCEW average annual pay, full year 2022, versus this study's first-quarter-2023-annualized figure Geography Q1 2023, annualized Full year 2022 Sarasota County $87,048 $95,498 Manatee County $92,300 $90,864 Charlotte County $92,300 $80,562 Florida $101,244 $98,093 United States $124,072 $117,093 The finding this study reports – every county below the state figure, and below the national figure – holds under either window: $95,498, $90,864 and $80,562 are all still below both $98,093 and $117,093. But the two windows do not agree with each other in every particular. Charlotte's full-year 2022 average, $80,562, sits well below its own first-quarter-2023-annualized figure of $92,300, and is not close to Manatee's full-year figure either – the exact coincidence this study reports for Manatee and Charlotte is a property of the first quarter of 2023 specifically, not a stable year-round fact about the two counties. A reader who wants the full-year window instead of the first-quarter one this study leads with can reproduce it from the query pattern above, changing /2023/1/ to /2022/a/. ### No revenue variable at this geography Confirmed against the CBP variable list at https://api.census.gov/data/2022/cbp/variables.json: CBP publishes ESTAB, EMP, PAYANN and EMPSZES, and no receipts, sales or revenue variable of any kind, at any geography. The Annual Business Survey does publish revenue (RCPPDEMP, used in the companion [Leverage Gap](https://stoneforgegroup.com/research/the-leverage-gap/) study) at the national and state level – confirmed live, Florida’s own professional-services revenue is published this way, $136,936,910,000, in the companion [Florida Owner-Led Firms](https://stoneforgegroup.com/research/florida-owner-led-firms/) study. The abscs API also accepts a county or metro geography for this same table, but confirmed live on 7 August 2026, the results are not usable at that granularity: Sarasota County returns a real figure with an 18.0% relative standard error on receipts, against 3.3% at the state level, and Manatee County returns a suppressed zero rather than an estimate at all. No public federal dataset currently publishes a reliable county-level revenue figure for this sector, which is why this study uses CBP instead, despite CBP publishing no revenue variable of any kind. ### Reproducing this study The pull script is scripts/research_pull.py, function cbp_rows(). Run from the repo root, with the Census API key passed as an environment variable, never hard-coded – the script aborts immediately if CENSUS_API_KEY is unset: CENSUS_API_KEY=your_key_here python3 scripts/research_pull.py It writes [assets/data/local-pay-by-county-2022.csv](https://stoneforgegroup.com/assets/data/local-pay-by-county-2022.csv), alongside the companion studies' two files. QCEW carries no API key requirement and is not part of this script; reproduce it directly from the query pattern documented above. scripts/research-provenance.py runs on every deploy and checks every CBP figure published on this page against a manifest of declared sources, offline – it never calls Census, so a deploy never depends on the API being up. Its --refresh mode re-pulls CBP live and reports drift; it cannot check the QCEW figures, since QCEW is a BLS source, not a Census one – those are declared as prose, with the exact reproducible query as their source note, for a human to re-run. ### Known limitations The limitations that apply to every study on this site – current size is not peak size, this is a snapshot rather than firms followed over time – are stated in full on [the research hub](https://stoneforgegroup.com/research/). Specific to this methodology: - **Establishments, not firms.** Every county-level figure on this page counts establishments. A multi-location practice is counted once per location. See Establishments, not firms, above. - **Two different time windows.** CBP is full-year 2022; QCEW as used here is a single quarter, annualized. See Robustness against the full year, above. - **No sub-county detail.** Neither series is broken out below the county level, so this study cannot say whether pay varies within a county – between a city and its surrounding unincorporated area, for instance. - **Only national and state totals for revenue, and state itself is a stretch.** As stated above, no revenue variable exists in County Business Patterns at any geography. The Annual Business Survey does publish revenue at the national and state level, and its API technically accepts county and metro geography too, but confirmed live, county-level cells for this sector are either suppressed or carry a relative standard error several times the state level’s – not a usable county-level figure in practice. - **Sector, not subsector.** NAICS 54 / 541 bundles legal services, accounting, architecture and engineering, computer systems design, management consulting and advertising into one code, the same bundling the companion Leverage Gap study documents at the national level. This study cannot rule out that a different subsector mix across the three counties explains part of the pay difference, rather than the counties themselves paying differently for the same mix of work. ## Citing this work Stoneforge Consulting Group, *What the Local Market Pays*, 2026. Published 7 August 2026. Analysis of US Census Bureau County Business Patterns (2022) and US Bureau of Labor Statistics Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (Q1 2023). https://stoneforgegroup.com/research/what-the-local-market-pays/ ## More research This study is part of Stoneforge's ongoing analysis of federal business data. See [all published studies, sources and limitations](https://stoneforgegroup.com/research/).